For Our Family
by sunsolace
Summary: In the wake of the Battle of Bunker Hill, nothing is clear any more. They stand together atop the CIT ruins, worlds apart. Part 6 of A Lantern in the Dark.


**A/N:** Spoilers lie ahead! If you haven't reached the Institute yet, you might want to hold off reading. Sorry about the amount of dialogue taken from the game, but this was another conversation I wanted to rewrite a bit.

* * *

X4-18's coolant fluids cling to her jacket. A decent approximation of blood. Close enough to a human's, the way it sprayed on the alley wall—close enough for the image to lurk behind her eyes. Months ago she might have retched at the thought, let alone the sight—let alone doing the deed—but now her stomach is sunken with lead. Even with her orders to dispose of the courser and run, there had been no way to avoid being drawn into a three-way battle between the Railroad, the Institute and the Brotherhood of Steel.

So much blood. And for _what_?

She drags herself through streets that are as battered as her body. The river slings around the bend on her left, dark and thick and sluggish. In the wan dusk, Kaelyn wants to pretend the river is polluted with litter, not radiation. But the burnt out husks of buildings, perched on the banks like rows of jagged teeth, break the illusion.

Kaelyn paws in her jacket for the small item that sits in a protected spot near her heart. She slots the holotape into place and presses play.

A baby's giggles breaks the evening chill. On the recording, Nate cheers. _"Yay! Hi, honey..."_

Even after the apocalypse, city nights are never quiet: gunfire pops in the distance and an explosion across the river booms like thunder, sending debris plunking into the river. A vertibird circles somewhere in the distance. More gunfire, louder this time.

Any number of threats can track the sound of Nate's recording. With a clear sky, she should be creeping through crumbling alleys instead of rambling down Memorial Drive as if it's '77. But when Nate signs off with a hurried _'love you!'_ and the holotape pops out, she clicks the cassette closed again.

 _"I don't think Shaun and I need to tell you how wonderful a mother you are, but we're going to anyway."_

Shaun will be notified about Bunker Hill, if he hasn't already. But he and his damn Institute can wait.

The Commonwealth Institute of Technology looms on the corner. Its once-green courtyard is a square of tangled grass and mud, ringed by the grand pillars that still shoulder their burden to elevate a sanctuary for bright minds with little regard for its vacant halls. Kaelyn enters the CIT. Has to shove her weight into the door to get it open. The interior is as decrepit as its exterior, offering no indication of what lurks beneath its floors.

 _"Look, with Shaun, and us all being at home together, it's been an amazing year. But even so, I know our best days are yet to come."_

Kaelyn has to stop on the second floor and lean against the wall. Her head swims and her pulse roars in her ears while a stitch twists a shiv of pain into her kidney. Her ribs above it are on fire. She almost chokes on dust.

Finally, the world slows to its rightful speed and Kaelyn can hear Nate's voice again. She continues up the stairs.

 _"But everything we do, no matter how hard... we do it for our family."_

The CIT roof has no railing of any kind, only a row of tiles to mark the drop off. Easing herself down with a wince, Kaelyn lets her feet dangle over the edge. Only a faint band of gray marks the horizon now. A breeze dries her sweat, adhesing grime and blood to her skin.

 _"Say goodbye, Shaun. Bye bye? Say bye bye?"_

Air behind her crackles and pops. The hairs on the back of her neck rise from the static. A flare of white-blue, colder than lightning, illuminates the space around her. Without turning, Kaelyn _knows_.

Click. Click.

 _"Hi, honey..."_

He says nothing, and neither does she, as another loop of the holotape plays.

A hand clasps her shoulder, and Kaelyn almost falls off the roof in surprise. His fingers exert little pressure; she can hardly feel it through her jacket. His is a hand that has lost its strength to time and is now little more than skin stretched over frail bones. They're more like her _tatta_ 's than anything else, as wrinkled and mottled and worn as they are.

Kaelyn remembers Shaun's chubby fingers catching in her hair or pulling Nate's dog tags out of his shirt. The way his tiny fists would swipe over his face when he was tired.

 _My baby,_ she thinks. Something cracks in her chest.

"What... was he like?"

Kaelyn waits. She knows who Shaun refers to, but she wants to hear him acknowledge it out loud.

After a pregnant pause, he obliges her. "My... father. What was he like?"

"One of a kind. From looking at him, you never would have thought he'd been in the military. A professional sloucher, that one. And he was sweet without being overbearing. He loved that stupid _Grognak_ comic; he had shelves upon shelves of them. Winter was his favorite season until he came home from Anchorage." A sad smile creeps over her face. "He retired from the army for you so he could watch you grow, so he wouldn't leave you fatherless. He loved you so much."

 _He died trying to protect you._

If Shaun notices what she's left unsaid, he ignores it. "Had things been different— but they weren't. I suppose it hardly matters now. I'll be meeting him soon enough, I suspect."

A step above _collateral damage_ , but not by much.

Shaun rises to his feet on creaking knees and steps back. He looks out at the crumbling skyline. In profile, the broad slope of his shoulders and the angle of his nose look so much like Nate's her heart twists. "I've never been to the surface before. Not once in my life—"

"You were born on the surface," she reminds him, a touch icy. "Your first year of life was on the surface."

"True. However, you and I both know I never had a reason to leave the Institute. But this..."

Kaelyn finds her feet. For several dangerous moments, the world spins and the edge of the building yawns at her feet like the hungry maw of some night creature impatient for its prey. "All I can see is how things used to be before the bombs. Before so many people died."

Shaun gives her a pitying look. "I can't possibly imagine."

"No, you can't," Kaelyn agrees. "You were too young to remember what it was like before. The world I wanted for you is centuries gone."

With a clinical detachment, The Institute's Director examines Boston's half-dead carcass laid out, bleeding and twitching, on the morgue slab. "The Commonwealth is dead. There is no future on the surface."

Kaelyn's gut clenches. _This isn't what I wanted for you._

"No, Shaun," she says, softly. "You're wrong. No one wants to believe this place is dead more than I do. It's easy to get caught up in what I've lost—what we've all lost. But you have to look past it. People always find a way to survive the unlikeliest circumstances. The people of the Commonwealth? Against all odds, they're still alive."

"Even so, their existence will never measure against the Institute's—"

"No, Shaun," Kaelyn repeats, sharper. She halts beside him, just inside his personal space. "Their dreams are worth no less than yours. There is a future on the surface. It won't be the future the Institute is trying to chart, but it is a future."

"You say that as if all futures are of equal value." Clasping his hands behind his back, Shaun turns to face her fully. "Seeing all this... I am grateful I was spared from living on the surface. I know that to you, the Institute kidnapped me. But in truth they rescued me."

It shouldn't hurt as much as it does. The pain in her side throbs in time with the pulse in her temples. "We'd all still be in the vault if not for your Institute," Kaelyn snips before she can catch her tongue. _Get a grip._

Shaun tilts his head. "You find cryogenic stasis preferable?"

"No, but everyone would still be alive." If the price of freedom is every other life in cryo, it's too steep to pay. "Your father, our neighbors. But the Institute had to play God, and our lives meant nothing to you, and then they left me on ice— _for sixty years_."

His eyes flicker. "They did, and for good reason. I was the perfect candidate; an infant with uncorrupted DNA. But if something were to go to wrong—if I died—well, the Institute realized as contingency was prudent. Another source of pre-war DNA, preferably related to their primary subject. It made sense my parents should fill this role. So you were kept alive and safe in the vault." Pressing his hands against the his pristine lab coat at his thighs, he looks back to the skyline. "I admit, when I had you released from Vault 111, I had no expectation you would survive in the Wasteland—"

" _You_ let me out of cryo? You thought I was going to die—and if I did, you would have been fine with that?"

Shaun is quick to deny it. "No, not fine. And yet you proved me wrong. Not only did you survive, you managed to infiltrate the Institute itself to find me. Extraordinary."

Kaelyn does not share the feeling of awe. Her voice is hoarse, edging into a whisper. "Why? Why let me out, after all this time?"

"That is— well, that's difficult to explain." Shaun returns to observing his first post-war Commonwealth night. "Certainly it was no longer necessary to keep you suspended. I suppose I—" He hesitates. "I wanted to see what you would do. An experiment, of sorts. Would the Commonwealth corrupt you, as it has everything else? Would you even survive? Perhaps most curious to me: would you try to find me, after all this these years? Now I know the answer."

Each new explanation is a hot knife to her chest, until she can't breathe through the pain.

"Why wouldn't I try to find you? I thought you were— all this is to you— all I am to you is just another _experiment_?" Her voice cracks on the last word.

This is her son, the baby she sacrificed so much to find?

"No, not all." Shaun says this very quietly. "I am glad things turned out as they did."

 _That's all you have to say?_ Kaelyn is too aggrieved to speak.

 _This is my son. This can't be my son._

Shaun gives her a pitying look. "Soon I hope... you'll understand. I want you to know, everything I've done has been for the future of humanity."

"And everything I've done has been for my family." Kaelyn takes a step forward, peering up at Shaun. She can distinguish little more than his beard and the reflection of his eyes, as dark as her own. "Do your justifications help you sleep at night? Because mine sure don't."

Shaun raises his chin, yet carefully avoids eye contact. "Everything I have done has been regrettably necessary. The Institute truly is humanity's best hope."

 _He's my son. He can't be. He isn't concerned about any of the harm the Institute has caused, not for a moment._

It hits her, then, with all the force of an atomic bomb.

She backs up one step, then two, shaking her head no matter how it makes the world swim in muddy-toned ripples. "I can't keep doing this, Shaun. You led me to that synth boy just so you could test his emotions. You call your own father's murder 'collateral damage'. You— you let me out the vault to die. I bled for you. I sacrificed everything for you. I killed to find you, and this is all you have to say?"

Shaun steps forward to catch her shoulder, but age and complacency have slowed his bones. "Mother, please. I assure you, you are far more than 'just another experiment' to me."

Kaelyn can only shake her head with a smile that warps the edges of her mouth. She'd been a lawyer, once, in another life. She knows people. She knows how they talk. Not only what they say, but when, and why, and how. "I don't think it's an accident that these are first answers that you reach for. I can't take much more of this."

She turns away from her son. Her right leg stiffened during their conversation and now Kaelyn hisses.

Behind her, Shaun sounds alarmed. "After— after everything, after all the marvels you've seen in the Institute, you're just going to walk away?"

Kaelyn rounds on him, pulse throbbing hot in her neck, caught in the rush of lightheaded fury. "The Institute is as bad as Vault-Tec, you know that? They lied to us. They screwed with our lives. You treat people like they're test subjects to be used and discarded at your leisure. Those crops Bioscience has been cultivating? Those could do a world of good up here. To test them on the surface, you could have sent agents—or even just synths—to clear land tor a farm. Hell, you could have just walked onto any abandoned property and claimed the place. But what do you do? You kidnap a farmer, interrogate him, _murder_ him, and replace him with a synth!" She turns again, and is time her knee is a little more cooperative. But her side only hurts more with every passing second. "Who made you the sole arbiter of our worth? Your marvels are steeped in blood and I _can't_ do this, Shaun."

With every step, her feet feel like lead. Clenching her fists can't quell the trembling in her hands. A tiny voice in her head screams _that's Shaun_ and _what about the Railroad_ but Kaelyn is beyond caring.

"Wait! I still need to know why we lost at Bunker Hill."

"Fuck Bunker Hill." The words are sharp and acrid on her tongue, and so very satisfying. Foreign, the way the angles of the word fill her mouth. She'd once believed that eloquence and civility were paramount, and more effective than swearing. The air feels hot, then cold. "That's the _least_ of my concerns right now."

Behind her, Shaun's voice is muffled under the hollow ringing in her ears. Pain lances up her side, her ribs white-hot bands of iron constricting her chest. A prickle of heat washes from the crown of her head all the way down to her toes, followed by a wave of ice.

 _Mother._

Cold blue-white light.

But it… isn't daytime?

The concrete under her head is strangely soft and crisp. Her nose burns with every breath, assaulted by harsh astringent. She twitches her fingers, feeling for a weapon, and something warm envelops her hand.

Her eyelids are almost too heavy to lift. When she manages the Herculean task, she only has a moment of blinding white before her eyes protect themselves. On the fourth attempt, she succeeds in slitting open her eyes. Her vision resolves itself to find a figure sitting beside her. Under the sterile lights, his bronzed skin seems so much brighter than her own. For the first time, she sees flecks of Nate's green in Shaun's hazel eyes.

"Ah, so you are awake."

When she registers the sterile-gray ceiling, she lurches up. _No—_

A hand catches her shoulder and presses and she can't get her elbows out in time before her back hits the mattress. She can hardly keep her eyes open under the assaulting white lights.

A foreign voice: "She's distressed. In this state, she could cause harm to herself or others. A sedative would be—"

Before she can struggle free, Shaun cuts a hand through the air. The same hand that had forced her back down on the bed. "That won't be necessary, Doctor."

Kaelyn scans the room, pulse jumping in her throat, head spinning. Exits guarded by coursers. The doctor at the end of her bed taking her vitals—no syringes in view. The clinic is too quiet and too bright.

And Shaun sits beside her. Holding her hand.

"It is quite alright, Mother," he says. "You're safe here in the Institute. You fainted on the rooftop. Do you remember?"

Hearing _Institute_ and _safe_ in the same sentence makes her skin crawl, but she lets out a long, shaky breath. Closing her eyes, she nods. Her throat is like glass, beaten into knife-edged chunks of sand. "Yeah."

The doctor rattles off a list of conditions, but too many words contain over four syllables. Kaelyn catches _low blood sugar_ and _wrenched knee_ and _broken ribs_. All she wants to know is when she'll be cleared to leave, and if any damage was permanent. The answer to the former is unknown, and the latter is most likely no.

After dismissing the doctor, Shaun leans forward in his seat to watch her with eyes too green and too crinkled. "It seems I erred in my judgment."

If her heart swells with hope, it's immediately punctured by his next words. "I should have assigned more coursers to you, to keep you as safe as possible in the battle. I apologize for putting you through this stress and injury, Mother. Many of my colleagues are not convinced of your loyalty. I had hoped playing a pivotal role would cement your place in the Institute. I may have allowed eagerness to blind me—you've made it so far I mistakenly assumed you are indestructible. As for our discussion, I understand that you were… not in a sound frame of mind."

Kaelyn drags her free hand over her face, brushing away any excess moisture caught in her eyelashes. She should apologize. If not for the things she said, then at least how she said them. Even if the thought of joining the Institute— _actually_ joining the Institute—twists her stomach with nausea, exacerbated by the drugs fogging her system. "Shaun, I—" Her throat closes over, like a rubber band snapping in place around a bundle of those glass shards. "To you, the Institute rescued you. But to me, they kidnapped you—and murdered your father along the way. Why should I ever forgive that?"

Shaun drops his gaze to their joined hands. "I know it must have been difficult for you, but the future of humanity depends on the Institute. Depends on us. There's too much at stake for… the desires of one person to outweigh the benefit to the many."

She grabs his wrist with her other hand. "I don't care about the Institute. I care about _you_."

Emotions flit across his face, too fast to parse, but his fingers briefly tighten around her own. "Contrary to what you may think, I am aware you hold little regard for the Institute. Your outburst earlier confirmed that. But… please. This has been my life's work."

Kaelyn shifts, and the crisp sheets barely stick to her skin. She sighs.

"I realize we've never sat down and talked... mother to son."

No matter the hurts already inflicted, her traitorous heart swells. It isn't without conflict, however: a part of her that has become accustomed to the lively church undercroft with its warm lanterns and warmer laughs. A part of her wants to rail and flail and never forgive. "I'd like that."

Shaun nods. What should be a firm gesture is undercut by the way his free hand fiddles with the hem of her blanket. In that moment she can see him as a boy, scuffing his toes on the carpet while he explains his latest mishap to his parents. "I have a Directorate meeting to attend, but... after. We can talk more after."

Kaelyn squeezes Shaun's hand before he pulls free. He squeezes back with that old man's grip.

When he's gone, she curls into a ball and gives in to the tears.

* * *

 **A/N:** On my first PT, this is exactly what I did: walked from Bunker Hill to the CIT ruins playing Nate's holotape on repeat. Little did I know how appropriate it would be for the coming conversation.

 _Tatta_ \- father


End file.
